de Carabas wrote:Roger, why not just send your box to TheBS to sort out?
I actually do that for many people. I go to local tech meetings for a reason, to help people in-person.
de Carabas wrote:Once again I'm left in awe (and confusion) by your extremely knowledgeable posts TheBS!
It's extremely difficult to 'keep up.' But once you learn native uEFI booting with GPT disk labels ... you never want to go back to old PC BIOS and MBR. It solves a crapload of multiboot issues. Of course, you must backup your GPT regularly with all its IDs, if you want to restore the disk if you ever lose it. Microsoft hardcodes too many GPT partition IDs, and Windows will refuse to boot without them.
I've been doing native uEFI boot since 2010. I had to literally hack the Red Hat Anaconda installer for RHEL 6 GA to support IBM-Lenovo System X5 servers, and then it wasn't really until 6.2 that they got everything worked out. I learned way, way more than I needed to. By 2011, Red Hat had GRUB/GRUB2 doing uEFI pretty well, although IBM-Lenovo firmware is still a PITA at times. Most other Linux distributions have supported native uEFI well by 2014.
So ... I've been installing Windows 7 in native uEFI mode since 2012 as a result. It's there, but most people don't know you can install that way. All pre-installed Windows 8+ from Tier-1 PC OEMs come installed in native uEFI mode. It's the first issue people run into when they re-install using a Windows disk. Most of us re-install Windows with an USB using the Rufus Tool instead of Microsoft's creator, especially if we're going to use uEFI+GPT.